The crisis in journalism today shouldn't obscure mainstream media's long history of masking the truth and acquiescing to power. From the Vietnam War to credit default swaps to climate change, in many ways American journalism brought crisis on itself.  

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.

Everyone knows this story, though fewer and fewer read it on paper. There are barely enough pages left to wrap fish. The second paper in town has shut down. Sometimes the daily delivers only three days a week. Advertising long ago started fleeing to Craigslist and Internet points south. Subscriptions are dwindling. Online versions don’t bring in much ad revenue. Who can avoid the obvious, if little covered question: Is the press too big to fail? Or was it failing long before it began to falter financially?

In the previous century, there was a brief Golden Age of American journalism, though what glittered like gold leaf sometimes turned out to be tinsel. Then came regression to the mean. Since 2000, we have seen the titans of the news presuming that Bush was the victor over Gore, hustling us into war with Iraq, obscuring climate change, and turning blind eyes to derivatives, mortgage-based securities, collateralized debt obligations, and the other flimsy creations with which a vast, showy, ramshackle international financial house of cards was built. When you think about the crisis of journalism, including the loss of advertising and the shriveled newsrooms -- there were fewer newsroom employees in 2010 than in 1978, when records were first kept -- also think of anesthetized watchdogs snoring on Wall Street while the Arctic ice cap melts.

Deserting readers mean broken business models. Per household circulation of daily American newspapers has been declining steadily for 60 years, since long before the Internet arrived. It’s gone from 1.24 papers per household in 1950 to 0.37 per household in 2010. To get the sports scores, your horoscope, or the crossword puzzle, the casual reader no longer needs even to glance at a whole paper, and so is less likely to brush up against actual -- even superficial -- news. Never mind that the small-r republican model on which the United States was founded presupposed that some critical mass of citizens would spend a critical mass of their time figuring out what’s what and forming judgments accordingly.

Don’t be fooled, though, by any inflated talk about the early days of American journalism. In the beginning, there was no Golden Age. To be sure, a remark Thomas Jefferson made in 1787 is often quoted admiringly (especially in newspapers): "If it were left to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter."

Protected by the First Amendment, however, the press of the early republic was unbridled, scurrilous, vicious, and flagrantly partisan. In 1807, then-President Jefferson, with much more experience under his belt, wrote, "The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”

Two Golden Decades 

If there was a Golden Age for the American press, it came in a two-decade period during the Cold War, when total per capita daily newspaper circulation kept rising, even as television scooped up eyeballs and eardrums. Admittedly, most of the time, even then, elites in Washington or elsewhere enjoyed the journalistic glad hand. Still, from 1954 to 1974, some watchdogs did bark. Civil rights coverage, for example, did help bring down white supremacy, while Vietnam and Watergate reportage helped topple two sitting presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Of course, press watchdogs also licked the hands of the perpetrators when Washington overthrew democratic governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and when it helped out in Chile in 1973. As for Vietnam, it wasn’t as simple a tale of journalistic triumph as we now imagine. For years, in manifold ways, reporters deferred to official positions on the war’s “progress,” so much so that today their reports read like sheaves of Pentagon press releases. Typically, all but one source quoted in New York Times coverage of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incidents, which precipitated a major U.S. escalation of the war, were White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials (and they were lying). In the war’s early years, at least one network, NBC, even asked the Pentagon to institute censorship.

Nonetheless, the sense that the war was an unjustifiable grind grew, especially after the Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive of January-February 1968, startling the U.S. military, Washington officials, and journalists alike. When, in 1969, Seymour Hersh reported for the tiny Dispatch News Service that a unit from the Americal Divisionhad slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in a village named My Lai, his story went mainstream.

Still, the long bombing campaign that President Nixon ordered in Cambodia and Laos did not feature on television, and barely made the newspapers. And even when, in a remarkable feat of reporting, it finally did in a major way, there was no journalistic sequel. The “secret” bombing of Cambodia -- secret from Americans, that is -- was reported on page one of the New York Times on May 9, 1969, and 37 years later, the reporter, William Beecher, said this about his story: “We're not talking of some small covert operation here, but a massive saturation bombing campaign, with a false set of coordinates to mislead the Congress and the public… You would have thought that such a story would have caused a firestorm. It did not.”

After Watergate, whatever hard-won, truth-bound independence the mainstream press had wrested from its own history failed to hold. In the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, for example, most Washington journalism once again collapsed into deference, and so, too, did the financial press on its own front. Washington’s war-making might and Wall Street’s financial maneuvers were both deemed too mighty, too smart, too hypermodern to fail.

Although the New York Timesand theWashington Postlater acknowledged flaws in their Iraq reporting, neither paper nor other major outlets have owned up to the negligence that led up to the great global economic meltdown of 2007-2008. We are far from grasping how fully business journalism played cheerleader and pedestal-builder for the titans of finance as they erected a fantastical Tower of Derivatives, which grew way too tall to fail without wrecking the global economy.

Start to finish, financial journalism was breathless about the market thrills that led to the 2007-2008 crash: the financialization of the global economy, the metastasis of derivatives, and especially the deregulation underway since the late 1970s that culminated in the 1999 congressional repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act (with President Bill Clinton blithely signing off on it). That repeal paved the way for commercial and investment banks, as well as insurance companies, to merge into “too-big-to-fail” corporations, unleashed with low capital requirements and soon enough piled high with the potential for collapse.

A Proquest database search of all American newspapers during the calendar year 1999 reveals a grand total of two pieces warning that the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a mistake. The first appeared in the Bangor Daily News of Maine, the second in the St. Petersburg Times of Florida. Count ‘em: two. 

On February 24, 2002, as the scandal of the derivative-soaked Enron Corporation unfolded, the New York Times’s Daniel Altman did distinguish himself with a page-one business section report headlined “Contracts So Complex They Imperil The System.” He wrote: “The veil of complexity, whose weave is tightening as sophisticated derivatives evolve and proliferate, poses subtle risks to the financial system -- risks that are impossible to quantify, sometimes even to identify.” He stood almost alone in those years in such coverage. Most financial journalists preferred then to cite the grand Yoda of American quotables, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. And he was just the first and foremost among a range of giddy authorities on whom those reporters repeatedly relied for reassurance that derivatives were the great stabilizers of the economy.

On March 23, 2008, as the bubble was finally bursting, Times reporters Nelson Schwartz and Julie Creswell noted that “during the late 1990s, Wall Street fought bitterly against any attempt to regulate the emerging derivatives market.” They went on:

“A milestone in the deregulation effort came in the fall of 2000, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill effectively kept much of the market for derivatives and other exotic instruments off-limits to agencies that regulate more conventional assets like stocks, bonds and futures contracts.”

“Little-noticed” indeed. According to Lexis-Nexis,not a single substantive mention of this law appeared in the Times that year. On October 1, 2000, Washington Post writer Jerry Knight did note ruefully, “What's fascinating about the policy debate is the agreement on the guiding principle: The government should not stand in the way of financial innovation.”

In a syndicated column on Christmas Eve, way-out-of-the-mainstream columnist Molly Ivins was not so poker-faced. She called the new law “a little horror.” And in that she stood alone. That was it outside of financial journals like the American Banker and HedgeWorld Daily News, which, of course, were thrilled by the act. That magic word “modernization” in its title evidently froze the collective journalistic brain.

Or in those years consider how the New York Times covered the exotic derivatives called “collateralized debt obligations,” among the principal cards of which the era's entire international financial house was built. These tricky arcana, marketed as little miracles of risk management, multiplied from an estimated $20 billion in 2004 to more than $180 billion by 2007. The Times’sFloyd Norris drily mentioned them in a 2001 front-page business section article about American Express headlined “They Sold the Derivative, but They Didn't Understand It.” He quoted the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank this way: "There are all kinds of transactions going on out there where one party doesn't understand it." From then on, no substantial Times front-page business section article so much as mentioned collateralized debt obligations for almost four years.

In 2009, in an enlightening article in the Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, looked at the nine most influential business press outlets from January 1, 2000, through June 30, 2007 -- that is, for the entire period of the housing bubble. A total of 730 articles contained what Starkman judged to be significant warnings that the bubble could burst. That’s 730 out of more than one million articles these journals published.

The formula was simple and straightforward: the business pressserved the market movers and shakers. It was a reputation-making machine, a publicity apparatus for the industry. In other words, the job of financial reporters in those years was to remain fast asleep as the most flagrantly abusive part of the mortgage industry, subprime mortgages, was integrated into routine banking.

Meanwhile, thanks to that same financial press, a culture of celebrity enveloped the big names of finance: CEOs of major banks, Wall Street investors, operators of hedge funds. They were repeatedly portrayed not just as fabulously successful tycoons doing their best for the society, but as fabulously giving philanthropists, their names engraved into the walls of university buildings, museums, symphony halls, and opera houses. They weren’t just bringers of liquidity to markets, but wise men, too. In an all-enveloping media atmosphere in which the press indulged without a blink, they were held to be not only creators of wealth but moral exemplars. Indeed, the two were essentially interchangeable: they were moral exemplars because they were creators of wealth.

The Desertification of the News 

Oh, and in case you think that the coverage from hell of the events leading up to the financial meltdown was uniquely poor, think again. On an even greater meltdown that lies ahead, the press is barely, finally, still haphazardly coming around to addressing convulsive climate change with the seriousness it deserves. At least it is now an intermittent story, though rarely linked to endemic drought and starvation. Still, as Wen Stephenson, formerly editor of the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section and TheAtlantic.com and senior producer of National Public Radio’s “On Point,” summed up the situation in a striking online piece in the alternative Boston Phoenix: the subject is seldom treated as urgent and is frequently covered as a topic for special interests, a “problem,” not an “existential threat.” (Another note on vanishing news: Since publishing Stephenson’s article, the Phoenixhas ceased to exist.)

Even now, when it comes to climate change, our gasping journalism does not “flood the zone.” It also has a remarkable record of bending over backward to prove its “objectivity” by turning piece after piece into a debate between a vast majority of scientists knowledgeable on the subject and a fringe of climate-change deniers and doubters.

When it came to our financial titans, in all those years the press rarely felt the need for a dissenting voice. Now, on the great subject of our moment, the press repeatedly clutches for the rituals of detachment. Two British scholars studying climate coverage surveyed 636 articles from four top United States newspapers between 1988 and 2002 and found that most of them gave as much attention to the tiny group of climate-change doubters as to the consensus of scientists.

And if the press has, until very recently, largely failed us on the subject, the TV news is a disgrace. Despite the record temperatures of 2012, the intensifying storms, droughts, wildfires and other wild weather events, the disappearing Arctic ice cap, and the greatest meltdown of the Greenland ice shield in recorded history, their news divisions went dumb and mute. The Sunday talk shows, which supposedly offer long chews and not just sound bites -- those high-minded talking-head episodes that set a lot of the agenda in Washington and for the attuned public -- were otherwise occupied.

All last year, according to the liberal research group Media Matters,

“The Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change... ABC's This Week covered it the most, at just over 5 minutes… NBC's Meet the Press covered it the least, in just one 6 second mention… Most of the politicians quoted were Republican presidential candidates, including Rick Santorum, who went unchallenged when he called global warming ‘junk science’ on ABC's This Week. More than half of climate mentions on the Sunday shows were Republicans criticizing those who support efforts to address climate change… In four years, Sunday shows have not quoted a single scientist on climate change.”

The mounting financial troubles of journalism only tighten the muzzle on a somnolent watchdog. It’s unlikely that serious business coverage will be beefed up by media companies counting their pennies on their way down the slippery circulation slope. Why invest in scrutiny of government regulators when the cost is lower for celebrity-spotting and the circulation benefits so much greater? Meanwhile, the nation’s best daily environmental coverage takes a big hit. In January, the New York Times's management decided to close down its environmental desk, scratching two environmental editor positions and reassigning five reporters. How could such a move not discourage young journalists from aiming to make careers on the environmental beat?

The rolling default in climate-change coverage cries out for the most serious professional self-scrutiny. Will it do for journalists and editors to remain thoroughly tangled up in their own remarkably unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes news? It’s long past time to reconsider some journalistic conventions: that to be newsworthy, events must be singular and dramatic (melting glaciers are held to be boring), must feature newsworthy figures (Al Gore is old news), and must be treated with balance (as in: some say the earth is spherical, others say it’s flat).

But don’t let anyone off the hook. Norms can be bent. Consider this apt headline on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek after Hurricane Sandy drowned large sections of New York City and the surrounding area: “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” Come on, people: Can you really find no way to dramatize the extinction of species, the spread of starvation, the accelerating droughts, desertification, floods, and violent storms? With all the dots you already report, even with shrunken staffs, can you really find no way to connect them?

If it is held unfair, or naïve, or both, to ask faltering news organizations to take up the slack left by our corrupt, self-dealing, shortsighted institutions, then it remains for start-up efforts to embarrass the established journals.

Online efforts matter. It’s a good sign that the dot-connecting site InsideClimateNews.org was just honored with a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

But tens of millions of readers still rely on the old media, either directly or via the snippets that stream through Google, Yahoo, and other aggregator sites. Given the stakes, we dare not settle for nostalgia or restoration, or pray that the remedy is new technology. Polishing up the old medals will not avail. Reruns of His Girl Friday, All the President’s Men, and Broadcast News may be entertaining, but it’s more important to keep in mind that the good old days were not so good after all. The press was never too great to fail. Missing the story is a tradition. So now the question is: Who is going to bring us the news of all the institutions, from City Hall to Congress, from Wall Street to the White House, that fail us?

Todd Gitlin, who teaches journalism and communications at Columbia University, is the author of The Whole World Is Watching, Media Unlimited, and many other books including, most recently, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street. 

Copyright 2013 Todd Gitlin

Image by Jarapet, licensed under Creative Commons.  

 

The practical and moral implications of erecting a paywall are not easy to untangle. So it’s no surprise that even the big important sources like the New York Times have gone back and forth. Back in September 2007, NYT announced that its entire print edition would be available online free of charge. The risky move made a big splash in the world of online news as other less profitable papers weighed the benefits and costs of following suit.

Like a lot of news junkies, I was delighted by the decision. In fact, the idea of paying for information seemed a little absurd to me at the time. As a student at the University of Minnesota, I had complete access to databases like JSTOR and LexisNexis. I relied on the fact that if I needed a book that Wilson Library or Andersen Library didn’t have, I could order it free of charge through Inter-Library Loan. And a surprising number of assigned readings had the familiar Modern History Sourcebook URL—a huge online database of primary history—free to all.

That the New York Timeswas also free to online users made perfect sense. The Internet offered free access to dictionaries and encyclopedias—why not newspapers? Why should information and news be reduced to a buyable, sellable product? What did subscription charges and advertising revenue have to do with reporting the news anyway?

Of course, the answer is quite a lot, especially to an industry in crisis. What’s more, it seems the free content party may be coming to an end. Last week, the Los Angeles Timesannounced that it was erecting a paywall for its online edition, thereby joining the litany of other sources like the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the dozens of local papers owned by Gannett that have already done so. Similarly, broadcasters plan to stream NCAA March Madness tournaments and analysis behind a paywall of their own.

The NYT window itself lasted just over three years. Last year—amidst critical reporting from the Arab Spring, no less—the paper announced the return of its pesky paywall, and that was the beginning of the end. But if smaller publications breathed a sigh of relief, the respite probably didn’t last.

For a struggling paper or magazine, the less consumers expect to get free content, the better. Newspapers have been hemorrhaging revenue since the late nineties, and it’s difficult to see how a traditional business model can respond to online content. But at the same time, many have become dependent on the very media that so threaten their existence.

Take bloggers. As Kevin Drum argues in Mother Jones, bloggers, like himself, rely on an enormous pool of free online content to glean and contextualize information. It’s a role created by a media landscape that couldn’t possibly be replicated any other way. But it’s also a role that many newspapers and print magazines have embraced, and now may need to preserve.

Even more traditional journalistic tasks are beholden to the Internet. When I was an intern at In These Times back in 2010, we relied on free online content for fact-checking. That academic journals, government databases, and newspapers were digitally at our fingertips made checking accuracy much more efficient and organized. And while In These Times and countless other publications certainly conducted fact-checking before the Internet came around, many of them also had larger staffs then—even whole fact-checking positions. Today, smaller staffs and fewer resources mean efficiency is at a premium, which again makes online all the more essential.

Similarly, the Internet’s rise has enabled and perhaps compelled the explosion in freelance and contract labor in journalism and publishing (not to mention those tricky unpaid internships). And now, proofing, copyediting, and fact-checking are even being outsourced from struggling newsrooms to foreign countries, reports Megan Tady of FAIR Extra.

“A new era of journalism is certainly upon us, where a newspaper simply can’t be successful without an online presence,” she writes. “Many journalists like to think that they’re irreplaceable, while media companies are beginning to think that they’re outsourceable.” In more ways than one, the rise of the Internet is responsible for this crisis, but ironically, the Internet is also necessary for the freelance editing and outsourcing that a lot of papers rely on to stay alive.

And of course, it wasn’t always about survival. The costs of doing business in the new era are wreaking havoc on what used to be essential for good journalism, writes former Inquirer reporter Chris Satullo. “Your real worry should not be whether newspapers survive,” he argues. “What you should worry about is the future of newsrooms, those buzzing, resourceful dens of collaboration that make everyone who works in them better than they could be alone.” 

Newspapers and magazines do have choices, but not many. If more of the big names rebuild their paywalls it may take some of the pressure off smaller and more local publications to provide free content. The alternatives—relying on unpaid labor, scattering newsrooms across the country and overseas, dumping foreign correspondents and bureaus—are not pleasant. The trouble is no one wants to be first to take the plunge. When the London Times imposed a paywall in 2010, they lost ninety percent of their online readership in less than three weeks, apparently proving the theory that online users will simply go somewhere else to avoid paying.

But so far, the New York Times’ model has fared much better (even as some readers beat the system), and this is good news for smaller sources. If consumers can get over their abrasion to paying for news, and if news sources can get over their fear of asking for it, the Internet may be a far less threatening place for journalism. 

Sources: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Gannett, All Things Digital, Mother Jones, FAIR Extra, Newsworks, PBS, American Journalism Review, The Guardian, Columbia Journalism Review, Wired.  

Image by SusanLesch, licensed under Creative Commons.  

During a late-night college powwow session many years ago, a guy asked me, for some reason, how much I weighed. I was 5 feet, 8 inches tall and pretty scrawny at the time from biking and walking across campus every day. I told him: 120 pounds.

“What!” he said. “Don’t worry, you don’t look that heavy.”

He was just a clueless college boy, but this bizarre line of thinking—that 120 pounds could possibly be construed as overweight for a 5'8" woman—isn’t limited to frat boys. It exists all over our advertising and our media. Every model in every commercial and every catalogue has stick-thin arms and legs, often made even more emaciated by Photoshop. Watch an episode of Project Runway and you’ll see the contestants picking apart the so-called flaws of a model who looks like she hasn’t eaten in a month—pointing out her “pouchy stomach” or her “big booty.”

PLUS Model Magazine, a publication celebrating the plus-size fashion industry, recently printed some revealing statistics about the models that exhibit our clothes, sell our products, and generally define female beauty. The highlights:

• Twenty years ago, the average model weighed 8% less than the average woman; today, she weighs 23% less.
• Most models meet the Body Mass Index physical criteria for anorexia.
• When the plus-size modeling industry began, the models ranged in size from 14 to 20; today, they average between a size 6 and 14.
• Half of American women wear a size 14 or larger, but most standard clothing outlets cater to sizes 14 or smaller.

As Madeline Figueroa-Jones points out, “we are not talking about health here because not every skinny person is healthy.” We’re talking about an abnormal body image that promotes anorexia-thin women as the standard. What’s almost as fascinating (and dispiriting) as PLUS Model Magazine’s revelations are the reader comments that follow the online article, largely focused on whether or not the (gorgeous) plus-size model featured in the accompanying photographs is “fat.” Which tells you that we’ve still got a long ways to go before that college boy mindset is in the minority.

Source: PLUS Model Magazine 

Image by PLUS Model Magazine, courtesy of PLUS Model Magazine. 

 

“The Swiss have mountains, so they climb. Canadians have lakes, so they canoe. The Australians have canyons, so they go canyoneering, a hybrid form of madness halfway between mountaineering and caving in which you go down instead of up, often through wet tunnels and narrow passageways.”

***

A rival to the Booker Prize has been announced, sending the literary world into an uproar.

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A black male feminist speaks out.

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Finally, you can carry David Bowie in your wallet.

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Afghanistan, Iraq, Ecuador, Antarctica, and more are the latest citizens of Google Maps’ growing empire of crowdsourced maps.

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For all you typography junkies (you’re out there, right?), Kerntype offers a strangely addictive kerning game, in which you move the letters in words left or right to achieve even spacing and optimal readability.

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One writer’s takeaway from South by Southwest Eco: We should care for the planet not because it makes economic sense, but because it’s the right thing to do.

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Big Agriculture mounts a PR campaign to counter the side effects of Food Inc.

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Let’s downsize Sprawlopolis by shifting property taxes to land dues.

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Gibson Guitar hits a sour note with environmentalists as it cozies up to the Tea Party.

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Murder City: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime offers a world map detailing homicide rates around the world.

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An upstart newspaper files dispatched from the edge of capitalism. Introducing, the Occupied Wall Street Journal.

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How do you get people to attend a reading? Host a Literary Death Match.

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The big business of televised food is bigger than you think. The ice in a beverage, for example, might be made of acrylic and cost $500 a cube.

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The decline and fall of America’s decline and fall.

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Puff, puff, pour? Leave it to the gourmands to add marijuana to upscale beers and wines.

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This new medical device is like a super soaker for the burn unit: It coats a burn victim’s wound with their own skin cells, allegedly healing the injury in days instead of weeks.

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Snarky t-shirt or serious chic? A design writer for imprint teases out the difficulties of choosing what to wear to a protest.

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What if Facebook developed a web browser to challenge Google?

Image by spacecadet, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Talk about a traffic jam: Globally, there are now 1 billion cars on the road.

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Lori Adorable offers women 8 ethical tips in her guide to feminist erotic modeling.

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A travel guidebook writer achieves transcendence on a 30-hour van ride across Mongolia.

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French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s indictment may have been dismissed, but the case still shed light on the sexual assaults suffered by hotel housekeepers.

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Advice from the world’s oldest investment banker, the 105-year-old Irving Kahn: “There are a lot of opportunities out there, and one shouldn’t complain, unless you don’t have good health.”

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Get ready for “The Missing Piece,” a forthcoming documentary which chronicles the 1911 theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

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Eight movie clichés illustrated.

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“It’s all too easy to divide the world into people like us and outsiders,” writes Tom Jacobs at Miller-McCune. “Newly published research points to a surprising factor that exacerbates this unfortunate tendency: Boredom.”

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Apparently John Huntsman thinks the GOP presidential candidate should try to appeal to more than just 10 percent of the population. Interesting strategy, sir.

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If Frida Kahlo’s most memorable physical features were her eyebrows, then her most forgotten was her weak spine, a condition which required her to wear plaster corsets for most of her life. They were, unsurprisingly, another sort of canvas for the idiosyncratic artist. Paris Review’s Leslie Jamison writes that Kahlo decorated her corsets “with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, and streetcars like the one whose handrail rammed through her body when she was eighteen years old.”

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Every year Beloit College releases a “Mindset List” that gives a snapshot of the “cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college” on a given year. The list for the class of 2015 includes factoids like “Ferris Bueller and Sloane Peterson could be their parents,” “Life has always been like a box of chocolates,” and “Women have always been kissing women on television.”

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Even after decades of study, neuroscientists find the brain a mysterious thing. The posterior cingulate cortex—sometimes called “the dark energy of the brain”—uses more calories than any other part of the brain (which burns 20% of the calories you eat), but scientists have no idea what it does.

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Popular Science explains how to make crop circles and offers up a gallery of the phenomenon.

Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, doesn’t think News Corp.’s antics in Britain—hacking phones, interfering in a murder case, bribes—were restricted to the British Isles. No, that just doesn’t add up to him, given the back-and-forth travel across the pond of some of Rupert Murdoch’s executives and editors. But that’s just Spitzer conjecturing, and it’s not the reason he’s calling for News Corp. to be investigated in the U.S. by the Department of Justice. According to Spitzer, the media company has already violated a U.S. law—the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “Indeed,” Spitzer writes, “the facts as they are emerging are a case study for why the FCPA was enacted.” The law was put in place in the 1970s in an attempt to give some sort of ethical boundaries to international business. And even if infractions take place completely overseas, companies based in the U.S. can still be held accountable here. “So,” writes Spitzer, “acts in Britain by British citizens working on behalf of News Corp. creates liability for News Corp., an American business incorporated in Delaware and listed on American financial exchanges.”

Read the rest of Spitzer’s argument, including calling for News Corp.’s FCC licenses to be revoked should the company eventually be found liable, at Slate.

Source: Slate 

Image by Alex E. Proimos , licensed under Creative Commons.

The Internet is boundless, yet we’re trying our best to fill it with words. Successful news, gossip, opinion, culture, and music websites have one thing in common: traffic. Google Analytics is the gold standard and online publishers have caught on. Blog publishing deadlines are shorter and more frequent. (We at Utne Reader are experts at taking our time.) The “stories” are shoddily fact-checked and often poorly edited. Content farms proliferate. But with all the thousands of words flung our way each day, it’s easy to forget that there’s a person behind every hastily-written, superficial article. And that person is probably getting paid peanuts.

Oliver Miller was one of those content mercenaries, that is, until he got fired by AOL Television. He recounted his grueling work experience in the content mill and his disenchantment with a contemporary writer’s life in a recent essay for The Faster Times. Miller’s tell-all is reminiscent—just as unbelievable, just as maddening—of the 2008 award-winning New York Magazinefront-lines account of Gawker Media and its hard-driving mogul Nick Denton by Vanessa Grigordiadis.

Miller worked late into the night, often assigned to write articles about popular television shows like “The Simpsons” and “Law & Order” in 30 minutes or less. The pressure to churn out stories made him push the boundaries of ethical reporting (he and his fellow employees were “actually instructed to lie by our bosses”) and suffer in health (“I had panic attacks; we all did. My fellow writers would fall asleep, and then wake up in cold sweats . . . One night, I awoke out of a dead sleep, and jumped to my computer, and instantly began typing up an article about David Letterman. I kept going for ten minutes, until I realized I had dreamed it all”).

The problem is systemic; a writer’s boycott of AOL or Huffington Post or Gawker, despairs Miller, won’t solve the larger issue at all:

I disliked my job, but I dreaded being fired from it, and with good reason; it’s been five months since my firing now, and I’ve run through my savings, and I still haven’t found another full-time writing gig.

And, as much as I need the money, maybe I shouldn’t. AOL is among the most egregious offenders—but then, this isn’t just an article about AOL. This is an article about a way of life. “The AOL Way” doesn’t simply stand as a pattern for a major corporation; it’s the pattern of the Internet as a whole. The Internet has created more readers than ever before in the history of the world. And yet, perversely, the actual writer is more undervalued than ever before. Every news site that hopes to survive, The Faster Times included, thinks about whether their titles will show up in search engines. In the age of Internet news, Google “keywords” matter . . .Regular old words, not so much.

Source: The Faster Times